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xv, 302 pages ; 1 illustration ; 20 cm ; National Library: 003690054; 012158898 LCCN: 04-17204 ; LC: PG3432 ; OCLC: 1260725 ; "Letters written by Turgenev to Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and other friends in France." ; "edited by E. Halperine-Kaminsky ; translated by Ethel M. Arnold." ; "That Ivan Sergu&vitch Tourgueneff was one of the most human and lovable of men readers of his novels must long ago have discovered for themselves, and the letters contained in this volume, written for the most part to his intimate friends among that group of remarkable Frenchmen who made Paris what it was in the fifties and sixties, can only confirm this impression. It may be said at once that Tourgueneff was in no sense a great letter-writer. Letters were to him precisely what they have been to many hard-working literary men and women, such as Balzac and George Eliot for instance-viz., merely a means to an end, that end being the communication of necessary information to his correspondents. They made no demand upon his literary sense, and, consequently, obtained no response from it. Only very seldom, when, for instance, he found himself back in his native land, on his own property in the Province of Orel, did he indulge in letter-writing rightly so-called, and then only because his sense of the complete ignorance of his correspondents as to his surroundings stirred his artistic instinct, urging him to produce graphic little word pictures of his setting and mode of life. For this reason the letters from Russia will probably be considered by the general public as the most interesting of the series.The last fifty years of this century have witnessed many changes in the world of art and letters, but perhaps no change has been so marked, or so revolutionary, as that which has taken place in the whole conception and character of the novel. Fifty years ago the romantic convention reigned supreme; truth, in our modern sense of the words, lay hidden at the bottom of the well. Time passed, and romanticism, together with all the stagemachinery of old-fashioned fiction, was thrown contemptuously on one side, and every novelist went a-groping down the well for Truth. Many of them emerged bearing inanimate objects covered with mud and slime which they palmed off upon a credulous world as the long-sought goddess, some bearing fragments of undoubted authenticity but insufficient of themselves to satisfy a desire as old as time, as enduring as eternity. Only one or two, and in our opinion Tourgueneff was preeminently one of this select band, found what they sought, and revealed to us the clear, strong, but pitiful face of Truth herself.The most interesting and intimate among them, are, as will be seen, addressed to Gustave Flaubert. The two men seem to have conceived an instantaneous liking for one another the first time they met, and this instinctive sympathy developed into a friendship which was only terminated by Flaubert's death. Of the letters which passed between them, we see of course in this volume only those written by Tourgueneff, but they arc quite sufficient to show how easy, affectionate, and confidential were the relations existing between the two men. The common termination of "Je vous embrasse" which, in order to avoid the foreign air a literal translation would inevitably have lent to the correspondence, I have generally translated by "much love to you," is alone sufficient to show the closeness of the friendship.1 But in order that no doubt may exist in the reader's mind as to its rec1procal nature, M. Halperine-Kaminsky gives us several quotations both from Flaubert's letters and from the de Goncourt Journals, which show clearly enough that Tourgueneff's affectionate admiration for the author of Madame Bovary was cordially and amply returned. The same may also be said with regard to his relations with Georges Sand, whom he always revered as the original source of his literary inspiration" ; green cloth ; wear on spine ; G. Seller Inventory # 007317
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